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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Part II: The Disfigurement of the Mother's Temple Vision

[This is Part II - the 'Introduction' of The Chronicles of the Inner Chamber; readers of this series may first want to read the blog's 'Introduction' and the Matrimandir Action Committee's 'Manifesto', or Part I - Preface, before continuing.]

The Mother was the executive power of the Supreme Lord. She was his own ‘executing architect’. The ancient Veda describe this magnificent power/principle as the Divine Maya. It is she who fashions material creation in the image of the Lord. She is the executor of his Will. Measure is the keyword, the very root of the word maya. It is, to be sure, a divine Maya, not human. The human maya is the ‘illusion’ of Advaita, a concept that has thoroughly conquered the yogic mind of India. Sri Aurobindo came to Earth to change that, to ‘correct the error of the Buddha’, as he wrote. The Mother was his formidable tool. Her most potent weapon was the Divine Maya which she brought to the Earth. And that is the essence of her original plan. Very few have grasped the Mother’s greatness in its fullest dimensions. Her original plan of the Inner Chamber reveals that greatness in all its multiple and singularly unique facets. Above all, it reveals her as the incarnation of the Vedic Divine Maya, the executor of the Transcendent’s Will. Precision was the Mother’s call; an engineer not an architect because she demanded this precision. Why was precision so important? It was so that the Divine Measure she brought to Earth in early January of 1970, in an extraordinary yogic feat, could be transposed into our world of time and space and measure. In this act her purpose for incarnating was encapsulated; in that plan we have the condensation of everything that the Mother was – what she came down with and what she grew into once she was born on Earth. The entire trajectory of her yoga is captured first in her own symbol, which forms the overall basis of the Chamber’s plan, and then all the other elements of the design as given by her. We will cover them all, one by one, in these Chronicles.The Mother’s Vision and its accompanying geometric plan is her legacy to humanity in that it reveals exactly what she accomplished up to that point in time; and also the exact stage of the Supramental Manifestation in January 1970. Her final gift to us was given during those eighteen days when she explained and defended her Vision before the non-believers (…’One is not going to say it. To begin with, they would not believe me’…). Nothing more would be needed. From that date, 17.1.1970, her consciousness was intensely occupied in the subtle planes where she consolidated the knowledge content of the temple so that in its complete form it too would be fixed for all times. The very first demonstration of her action across time and space was in March, barely two months later. It took the form of inspiration for a symbolic story in which the Chamber itself was described in Chapter Ten of the book. This was done without any contact between the Mother and the writer who was many thousands of kilometres away. Apart from its architectural form, in the same chapter the function of the Inner Chamber was described and, most importantly, its connection with Time. This was the very first demonstration of the Mother’s action as the Supramental Shakti in the subtle planes ‘to sort out the people’. It transpired immediately after rejection of her Vision. But there was much more to follow. To execute this in our world of material forms a new precision was required. The bridge between subtle and physical could only be constructed on the basis of these laws of a New Precision. From Sri Aurobindo’s A God’s Labour, the magnitude of her accomplishment is described…

…The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pourDown the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridgedAnd glimmer from shore to shore.

Heaven’s fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn

Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stair-way wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness’s end…

We entered at the stage of disfigurement in 1974. The Vision was already gone. But the history of its disfigurement is as fascinating as the revelation of the Divine Maya itself. To appreciate what follows, it is necessary to understand that it was fundamental to preserve a record of the original Vision and plan.

Those eighteen days of recorded discussions together with the original plan preserve what needs to be known to unravel the mystery; and also the ‘measure’ of all things. We will see how meticulously this works. The Mother’s Vision is reality, not what stands in the Auroville Matrimandir. True, the latter is ‘reality’ as we know it today. It is the misaligned human being with no luminous perfectly poised core – the human creature who, try as he might, can only spawn reproductions of his own misaligned binary condition in orbit of the ego’s emptiness.On the other hand, the Mother’s Vision described the true reality UP THERE, but in the process of manifestation, of descent. The greatness of the Mother was not the Vision itself but the subsequent ACT OF MEASURING. By this act she brought the Divine Maya into our world of time and space and imprinted it indelibly in the Earth-consciousness. It can now never be erased. She did this by way of a precision involving the measures of our contemporary world: metres and centimetres, backed up by a vast body of knowledge, the accumulation of thousands of years of inspired drishti by the ancient Rishis. Without that act of measuring there is no descent – no link is made, no imprinting. Therefore the Power preserved the record of those blessed eighteen days during which time the Mother imprinted her Vision on the Earth.Satprem showed no interest and supported Paolo in full. Paolo was interested in his own vision and nothing more. That was seconded by Satprem to the Mother herself in spite of the fact that she was handing them this greatest of rahasyas, this greatest of divine mysteries. To make his preference clear, in the midst of her laborious defence of her Vision, Satprem told her,‘But when Paolo showed me his plan I had the impression that it was something very beautiful…I will tell you what I felt. I felt: I am witnessing the birth of Auroville.’The Mother’s reply was quick and blunt, ‘No, it is not true.’ Again he insists, ‘I mean the material birth.’
The Mother once more replies, ‘Yes, yes, I understand, but it is not true.’(Source: L’Agenda de Mère, Vol. 11, L’Institut de Recherches Évolutives, Paris, 1981)

It defies human understanding how the Mother’s Vision could have been so totally rejected in favour of a simple architect’s ‘mental ideas’. Added to this is its perverse rejection by the whole community later. The answer to this baffling development lies in the nature of the Supermind and its revolutionary significance for ‘the birth of a new world’, as the Mother announced in 1957. These Chronicles will help to clarify the mystery. Finally, having completed the task of drawing that Vision into the Earth plane through the act of measuring and experiencing its rejection, the Mother handed it over to ‘the Consciousness’ to ‘sort out the people’ – those who would vibrate to her vision, and those who would vibrate to Satprem’s and Paolo’s and their executing engineer, Piero Cicionesi. She then began to ‘sort out the people’ by a meticulous action in the subtle planes utilising that very same ‘new precision’.The collective choice in favour of this Troika (Satprem/Paolo/Piero) was made in 1974.

It is expressed succinctly in Satprem’s own words which have been a mantra for the builders, particularly at times when they were faced with opposition to their designs, times like now when again they throw the same words at us. He wrote, ‘In the vision from above there are no centimetres; there is only an inner perfection that fits itself spontaneously into certain measures.’ By this sophistry he has effectively eliminated the Mother as the Divine Executor of the Supreme’s Will, as the Divine Maya. And further, ‘It is this inner perfection of the builders of Matrimandir that should be the exterior perfection of the temple [emphasis ours]. Not, then, a question of discussing centimetres or columns, but of working towards that unity of our consciousness. All the waverings between the Mother’s vision and the workers’ translation gives the exact measure of the ego’s interference.’Perhaps when he wrote these words Satprem did not realise just how true they were and their implications. For if we do indeed wish to discover ‘the exact measure of the ego’s interference’, it is only possible by holding that ‘translation’ up to the Mother’s Vision. That, and that alone, is the Divine Measure. Therefore, in these Chronicles we will analyse point by point what stands in the Auroville Matrimandir, measuring it up to the Divine Measure of the Mother’s plan. We will prove the truth of Satprem’s prophetic statement because the Divine Measure will give us the exact measure of the human ego that has been rendered in cement and steel in the Auroville Matrimandir. This imperfect form of the Measure of Man now serves as the focal point for aspiration of all the residents of Auroville, the Ashram, and the devotees of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo throughout the world, by their own conscious choice.But is this how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work is to end, with the human ego as the symbol, as the model to emulate? Or did the Mother have another ‘agenda’?Succinctly, we have a monument to human imperfection in place of the Mother’s Vision of Perfection. The choice for this was made in the mid 1970s. The present exercise aims at exposing this fact, while reinstating the Mother’s Vision at the heart of her work. The two versions have to be clearly defined now. The time has come.